IdeaStorm can help take your idea and turn it into reality.

Promote

A lot of folks have chimed in with things that developers need.  I think there's also some value in discussing what we DON'T need, because as we all know, design is all about trade-offs.

On the hardware side, there have been lots of comments already about needing more pixels on the screen, more RAM and maybe at least options for more CPU.

Hardware that I think most developers would be willing to give up in exchange for more of the above:

1. Battery life.  I'm sure that there are exceptions, but most developers will do their work someplace they can hook up to power; you can't make a laptop with today's technologies that will run for a full day of hacking on a battery, so don't try.  If my extra RAM, CPU and screen brightness that I need to be productive means that my battery is only good for 3 hours, so be it.
2. Fast Graphics.  Just enough graphics to run a modern desktop without stuttering.  Intel integrated is fine.

On the software side it's already been mentioned in a few places, mostly what we need is Dell standing up for quality drivers for all of the hardware.  What we don't need on software:

1. Custom Ubuntu builds.  Custom breaks stuff.  A lot of us will be reinstalling anyway with later versions of Ubuntu, Fedora or something like that.  Ditto for binary-only drivers with licensing restrictions.  The vanilla  Ubuntu experience is pretty good, don't mess with it.
2. Lots of software support.  We can figure out our own software.  If there were a simple known-good mini Linux install we could boot to that would allow us to test all of the hardware to make sure that problems we're having are or are not hardware-related, that's all that most of us need.  If users don't know how OpenOffice works, redirect them to community support in a forum or a wiki.

7 Votes | No Comments | Report Abuse